Category Archives: Religion and Science

The Fundamental Problem with Religious Belief

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This probably doesn’t need saying, but it is something towards which my last few posts have been building — not because of anything in the posts themselves, but because of the people who have chosen to respond in the comments. At its best, the blog format should allow people from all over the world to have a conversation, and to settle issues that are troubling them, using the best information, the best arguments, the best evidence to which they have access. It’s a bit like an open book exam, since there is nothing to stop anyone from coming to a cul-de-sac in his or her reasoning, and then looking things up on the internet, and providing some more answers to the questions that happen to be of interest to them at the time.

Yet, despite this, it seems that people are not really doing a whole lot of checking up on their arguments and evidence; they are simply “flying by the seat of their pants” — as though this is a productive or helpful way in which to conduct a conversation. By using a few posted comments as examples, I am not trying to ridicule anyone, for we all start off with a certain amount of information, a fairly well established set of biases and prejudices, and other things that give us the opinions that we have. And then, of course, remember that the comments are being made on a post, a published essay that is there in front of you, which is, you might say, the catalyst for your comments, and the comment stream itself includes statements of belief, evidence, and other things which add to the original essay, and which enable you to develop your own thoughts in a particular way.

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Philosophy should not be in the business of making the world safe for religion

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In my website Categories I have one entitled “Religion and Science,” under which this post, in part, falls. I put the terms in that order, instead of the more familiar order “Science and Religion,” for a very simple reason. The faux-discipline “Science and Religion” makes the assumption that there is room in science for religion; that is the presupposition underlying the study, if books like Thomas Dixon’s, the many books of John Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacock, Francis Collins, etc., are anything to go by. Indeed, Thomas Dixon is right up front about it in his book, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. By giving priority to science in his title the subtle suggestion is made that the impetus for the study comes from the side of science, but it is almost entirely a religious undertaking, as the following quotation makes clear:

The goal of a constructive and collaborative dialogue between science and religion has been endorsed by many Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the modern world. The idea that scientific and religious views are inevitably in tension is also contradicted by the large numbers of religious scientists who continue to see their research as a complement rather than a challenge to their faith. [Loc. 246/249 -- viz., in that general area of the Kindle version]

The problem with this is immediately evident. There is no reasonable claim that there is a constructive and collaborative dialogue between science and religion. Religion is a matter of beliefs founded in past events or in supposedly present subjective experiences reinforced by faith communities in which those beliefs (in their many different possible configurations) are foundational.

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Kepler and the Divorce between Religion and Science

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Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Since Kepler (see Wikipedia on Johannes Kepler) spent so much of his time expatiating with baroque grandiloquence on the harmony of the spheres, the perfect solids, the cosmological influence on individual lives (though he came to regard the specific predictions of astrology to be superstition), and tied all this and his cosmology up in Christian vestments and theological presuppositions, it might seem strange to speak about Kepler and the divorce between science and religion. Indeed, Kepler’s own laws of planetary motion almost got lost in debris from the Christian past with which his books were stuffed to overflowing; but when it came down to the fine points, the facts spoke for themselves, and religion was just the icing on the cake, and had nothing to do either with his major discoveries, or with the method used to discover them.That, at least, is my conclusion from reading Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers: The History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Now, no doubt many scientists and historians of science will consider Koestler’s book a bit of wheeze, really, a kind of jeu d’esprit, mainly concerned with the creative process, the near unconscious manner in which scientists stumbled onto their discoveries as if by accident, as though they were sleepwalking, and sometimes, as in Kepler’s case, almost without knowing that they had actually stumbled onto them. Kepler was, according to Koestler, much more concerned with the Pythagorean solids than he was with the actual mathematical relationships of the planetary orbits to the sun, and yet, despite this idée fixe, he managed to acknowledge not only the power of the facts, but their priority.

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Sister Margaret Farley has been a cause of confusion among the faithful, and risks great harm to them

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Most of  you, by now, will know about the book by Sister Margaret Farley, R.S.M., whose 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, which rocketed from a ranking of 146,982 on Amazon to 16 (number 1 in religious studies) and sold out in three days (according to a Guardian report). Though delivering a stinging rebuke to Farley, now retired from her position as professor of Christian ethics a Yale Divinity School, the Vatican, through the Inquisition (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), issued a condemnation of the book, its many divergences from Catholic teaching and Sister Margaret’s “defective understanding of the objective nature of the objective moral law,” but does not intend any further discipline, since Sister Margaret has now retired from teaching (and, presumably, can do no further damage).

The quotation comes from the official “Notification of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.,” 04.06.2012. The primary author of the notification is William Cardinal Levada, whose name appears on the Notification, who, before being raised to the cardinalate in 2006 was the Archbishop of Portland (Oregon) (1986-1995) and Archbishop of San Francisco (1995-2005). Now, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (also known in the past as the Holy Office of the Inquisition), the present pope’s former position under Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła, and making pronouncements about Catholic sexual ethics, it is probably appropriate that we recall that, in 1985, Levada was presented a report compiled by a priest, Tom Doyle, head of a three-man panel,  dealing with (according to Wikipedia) the “medical, legal, and moral issues posed by abusive clerics.” Doyle asked that the report be presented to a meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and was turned down. Levada himself, in an 2008 interview, stated without qualification:

I personally do not accept that there has been a broad base of bishops guilty of aiding and abetting pedophiles… If I thought there were, I would certainly want to talk to them about that.

Father Doyle said, in response:

I vividly recall briefing Levada in May, 1985 when he was an auxiliary bishop, about the sexual abuse crisis. I also have seen volumes of documents and sworn testimony from depositions that clearly shows that most, probably all, bishops clearly knew that priests were raping and otherwise sexually abusing kids as far back as the 40′s….and I limit it to that era because I have not gone beyond that in studying documents. So, Levada’s statement is either an outright lie or evidence of a very narrow understanding and perception of reality.

Yet this is the man who now presumes to condemn Sister Margaret Farley for her stand on various aspects of sexual ethics! It is only fair to remember this, and to recall that, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine the Faith, the man who is now pope joined cause with Levada in covering up the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests and other religious in worldwide Roman Catholic Church. There is scarcely a country in which this abuse did not happen under cover of the pretence of sanctity.

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Michael Coren and the faults of Christianity

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I had the fortune until recently of not knowing that Michael Coren existed, but now that he has been thrust upon my attention by Jerry Coyne’s really hard-hitting “Vacuous Comment of the Week” over at Why Evolution is True, and since, whatever his nationality of origin, Michael Coren writes as a Canadian (for shame! for shame!), I feel the need to venture into the quagmire too, and (mixing metaphors) to hold Michael Coren’s feet to the fire. Let’s start where Jerry starts, with the Amazon.com blurb comment on Coren’s new book: Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity:

Michael Coren explores why and how Christians and Christian ideas are caricatured in popular media as well as in sophisticated society. He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant. In a climate that is increasingly as ignorant of Christianity as it is good at condemning it, Coren gives historical background, provides examples of how these attacks are made, and explains the reality of the Christian response, outlining authentic Christian beliefs.

The interesting thing about this comment is that it is contradicted by statistics.  Apparently, in the United States, at least, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable about religion than religious believers. Only slightly more than half of Catholics polled knew that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine become substantially the body and blood of Christ when consecrated by a priest! (Google “Atheists and knowledge of religion” for 16 million hits.)

However, there is something even more important to note in the blurb’s claim about Coren’s book. According to Coren, Christianity does not support slavery, is not racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, does not provoke war, resist progress, and is not repressive or irrelevant. Let’s take them one by one.

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Is Dawkins really hoisted by his own petard?

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‘Krudt’ is ‘gunpowder’ in Danish, ‘Lunte’ a fuse

Well, William E. Carroll believes that he is. In an article in The Catholic Thing — Catholics have so many journals and newspapers, organisations and institutions, that they seem to be running out of names for them! — called “The Dawkins Challenge“, Carroll thinks he has caught Dawkins out in a contradiction — ‘hoist by his own petar’,’ as Hamlet says of his uncle Claudius, the king, whose letters to the King of England, borne by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (R & G), are supposed to compass Hamlet’s destruction. But Hamlet alters the letters, so that R & G become the victims, and Claudius is “hoist by his own petar’,” while Hamlet — delving “a yard below their mines, … blow[s] them at the moon.” A petard is a small bomb or mine (in contemporary French, a firecracker), leaned against or attached to a gate or barrier to weaken or destroy it. Has Dawkins blown himself up with his own bomb?

Here’s Carroll’s argument:

Dawkins, in recent statements, has said that Catholics should be held to account for their nutty belief in transubstantiation. According to Catholic dogma the bread and the wine of the Eucharist really become — that is, metaphysically change their substance — from bread and wine to “body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ.” According to Catholic doctrine, while the substance changes, the accidents do not. As Carroll says:

The rationale behind the doctrine, which is known as transubstantiation, employs categories of substance and accident, which have their origin in the philosophy of Aristotle. According to the Church, the underlying substances of bread and wine are replaced by the body and blood of Christ while the external appearances of bread and wine remain. A scientific analysis of the consecrated host and wine would only detect these external appearances.

Now, this is an amazingly nutty thing to believe, as Dawkins says, and the Church should be ridiculed for teaching it as revealed doctrine. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — in the supposed revelation of God to Christians, that either suggests or implies this doctrine. When the gospel Jesus says, at the Last Supper, “This is my body” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you” (Luke 22.19), or when Paul says “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10.16), there is simply no reasonable understanding of these words, as then spoken (that is, supposing that the gospel records are accurate reports of what a man called Jesus, who was shortly to be crucified, actually spoke on that occasion), that implies either that Jesus is speaking other than figuratively, or that Paul is interpreting the words in terms of a strictly literal meaning.

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The Tide of Religious Idiocy at the Full

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People like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne continue to play gentlemanly games with words in which they pretend that they are reconciling religion and science. Despite their assurances it is clear that no such reconciliation takes place. If it had, scientists would use religious insights and categories for their usefulness to science, and the religious would help to deepen religious faith by preaching about the wonders of science. It really is only a pretence, no matter how much accommodationists continue to distort the relationship of science and religion, and regardless of the attempt by scholars in the supposed discipline of “Religion and Science” to assimilate science to religion by persistently fictionalising the history of the relationship of religion and science.

Thomas Dixon shows us how this is done. In his little book, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, he tries to marry religious doctrine to scientific theory using various strategies. One of the most popular is to point out that religious scientists see no conflict between their religious beliefs and their scientific conclusions, seeing each as in some sense complementing the other. Of course, this in itself proves nothing more than that it is possible to compartmentalise our lives. Collins can work on the human genome project during the week, and then on Sunday entertain a completely different set of beliefs, entirely unrelated to what he does in the laboratory. That’s one reason why Elaine Ecklund’s “research” is pointless. Asking scientists about their religious beliefs shows no more than that it is possible to insulate some of your beliefs from others, so that you feel no cognitive dissonance. But people are continuously deceiving themselves about the scope of their beliefs. Roman Catholics, for instance, speak of the sanctity of life, but it is not obvious that the church can hold both this and then, at the same time, largely ignore the fact that children are dying of poverty, malnutrition and preventable disease at a startling rate, without ending up in a contradiction. Nor can they extol the sanctity of life, and then oppose controlling population growth, when excess population in some parts of the world puts so much stress on the environment that, sooner or later, the number of the dying will begin to increase from its already imposingly high number.

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M-Theory and Creation

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Jerry Coyne has already put up a critique of Russell Stannard’s HuffPo piece on the limits of science and the demand for humility, Russell Stannard being amongst those scientists who think that humility consists in injecting religious questioning into the scientific enterprise. In his article, “Science: A Call for Humility,” he raises the humility question in relation to scientific theory, not by suggesting that there is still more for science to learn — which is where real scientific humility lies — but by suggesting that we can always ask the question: Where do scientific theories come from?

After saying that Stephen Hawking has offered M-Theory as the ultimate theory of everything, Stannard explains, the ultimate question is still not answered, even if we knew what M-Theory looks like when written down; for,

even if the M-theory hypothesis is correct, does it in fact answer the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It would certainly account for the existence of the world. But would it not raise a fresh question: “Where did M-theory come from? What is responsible for its existence?”

To which Jerry Coyne’s answer is decisive:

M-theory (an extension of string theory) was suggested by Edward Witten in 1995. That’s where it came from. A theory is a model of nature produced by a human brain.

This is something that Stannard apparently does not understand, for he goes on with a long spiel about the inability of knowing things-in-themselves:

What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. — they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.

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Faith is a Cognitive Sickness

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I’ve been listening to some of Peter Boghossian’s public lectures about the nature of faith. Here are a couple of examples, and they’re worth watching straight through. Here’s the first — entitled “Jesus, The Easter Bunny and Other Delusions: Just Say No!”

That is quite long, and there is a shorter version, dealing with roughly the same things, accessible here — entitled “Faith: Pretending to know things you don’t know”

Now, as most of you will know, when philosophers and others begin to criticise faith as believing things, people of faith will immediately turn round and claim that faith has nothing to do with believing. They will begin, as the Archbishop of Canterbury did with Richard Dawkins, talking in poetic language, which, no matter how you read it, simply cannot be understood as belief about things “out there,” but become, instead, about things “in here” — “in my head,” “conformable to my feelings,” and so on.

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We are puzzled along with Dawkins. What could Rowan Williams actually mean by nature “opening itself up to its own depths”? But by slipping off into poetic language it seems as if he is no longer talking about things “out there,” and so the language of faith seems to escape the epistemic conditions necessary for us to be talking about “the same thing,” about something that could claimed with justice to be true.

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The Humanities, the Sciences and Ways of Knowing

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Philip Kitcher has just published an article in the Atlantic about the relationships amongst different ways of apprehending reality, and the overemphasis that he thinks is being placed on scientific methodology in defining what it means to know something. Entitled “The Trouble with Scientism,” Kitcher explores what he thinks of as a mistaken concentration on scientific methodology to the exclusion of other approaches to an understanding of the human condition. You may notice that I am carefully trying to steer clear, as much as I can, of the expression ‘ways of knowing,’ for that has been a misleading way of speaking about the disagreements here, and it is the one that is most often turned to in the response of those whom Kitcher would call the acolytes of “scientism”. Taking my cue from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy I have usually taken it for granted that there is no substance to the claim that anyone takes scientism seriously — that it is, in effect, a pejorative way of speaking about those with whom you disagree, even though no one actually holds the position. According to the Companion:

In philosophy, a commitment to one or more of the following lays one open to the charge of scientism.

  • The sciences are more important than the arts for an understanding of the world in which we live, or, even, all we need to understand it.
  • Only a scientific methodology is intellectually acceptable. Therefore, if the arts are to be a genuine part of human knowledge they must adopt it.
  • Philosophical problems are scientific problems and should only be dealt with as such. [814, qv. scientism]

I am now increasingly of the opinion, however, that there is a streak of scientism running through the gnu atheism, and that a number of gnu atheists whom I respect highly have adopted this position, committed to one or more of the above conditions.

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